Digital ink can be used to represent many kinds of user input, such as handwritten characters, sketches, drawings, gestures, and so forth. Although it is easy for humans to distinguish the meanings of different kinds of digital ink input, it is difficult for a computer system to distinguish among them.
As a result, computer systems operate in separate modes with respect to digital ink processing, whereby in general, existing digital ink recognition technologies mainly focus on one kind of digital ink information at a time. For example, when in a character recognition mode, handwriting character recognition technologies can only recognize digital ink as characters, even when the digital ink does is not intended to represent a character.
In many situations, users want to input different kinds of information when inputting digital ink to computer programs. However, existing digital ink recognition technologies are unable to differentiate such input, without specifically telling the program what the user intends to enter, that is, by manually changing input modes.